Do I have to use XP or Vista with a new PC?

krishna

devizes18193 wrote:

forgive me but you said it was a pc at work. Surley at the end of the day it will be down to your boss. Personally though if your happy with win 2k and your boss is happy then stick with it

We are a small charity. I'm answerable directly to the chair of trustees. It's my call. I'm the only one with any IT knowledge. I'm still figuring out Win2k and don't really want to have to start all over again with another OS. We are running 4 other PCs, all bar one (a laptop running XP Home) is running Win2K. If we are going to change OS I'd rather do it all at one time, but we can't afford to buy new machines all round. We use Win 2K and just resource share via a peer to peer ethernet network, no server.

albertross_2

judging by your use of the thanks button, you didn't like my suggestion.. but if you are going to wipe XP, what's the point in buying a new PC with a new £60 (or more if you buy pro) XP license, when a new hard disk is cheaper (£25), and will solve your problem?

If the disk problems you refer to are logical rather than physical, then you may not have to spend a penny, just run chkdsk.

Also, if you have W2000 oem licenses, then legally, the o/s isn't transferrable to another PC.

krishna

Thanks albertross. (button clicked now)

Replacing hard disk would solve some of the problems, but I'm not convinced it will resolve the speed issue. Am I wrong? Also, for space reasons I need to replace the existing Gateway CRT screen with a TFT. The way some of the deals work now, particularly with Dell, it seems we might as well take the opportunity to upgrade the PC. We have a second Gateway P6 PC, identical to the one I've been talking about. That crawls too and we have had no disk errors on that one.

albertross_2

When you say crawls, what happens, when does it go slow. Are they all patched at https://www.windowsupdate.com, have upto data AV etc? Did they always crawl, or has it just started?

Newer hard disks are faster than older ones, so this may help.

Gollom

albertross wrote:

Also, if you have W2000 oem licenses, then legally, the o/s isn't transferrable to another PC.

Beat me to it! Unless you have a Microsoft site licence (which is unlikely given the indicated size of your company) there is no way of buying W2000 for install on a new machine. I'd also add that there are likely to be driver issues on new hardware if you stay with W2000.

I empathise with what you are saying - but I am 99% certain that you cannot use W2000 legally on a new system and given the nature of your business, that is probably a show stopper.

However - an idea. There are a few companies out there who sell older spec systems (new or refurb) that come with W2000. They may well be more powerful than the system you have at the moment.

Hope I have helped a bit

Idiophreak

Personally, I think I'd buy a new PC with XP Pro on.

Like someone above said, it's actually a fair bit better than 2000. (much as I'd like to be an anti-MS linux fanboy...)

Also, if you shop around now, lots of places are doing vouchers with XP which give you an upgrade to Vista when it's released. I don't remember if it's free, or whether there's a small fee, but it's got to be better than just shelling out the whole amount for vista in a couple of months...

krishna

albertross wrote:

When you say crawls, what happens, when does it go slow. Are they all patched at https://www.windowsupdate.com, have upto data AV etc? Did they always crawl, or has it just started?

Newer hard disks are faster than older ones, so this may help.

You have a point. Yes they are all patched. All have up to date AV (NOD32) and we use Spybot and MS Malicious Software Removal Tool. My machine has been slower since I started trying to use Dreamweaver. And for various reasons I'm also going to need to install Illustrator - overkill, but not much choice as needs to be compatible with designer. Everything is slow, opening programmes, sending emails, opening files... and I think the HD problems may be part of the problem. But since the other identical PC is also slow I assumed that it wasn't just a hard disk issue. The other PC is not as slow, but it does take a while to do things. We have two Dells that are a bit newer and they are much more perky.

I think it has been getting worse.

krishna

Gollom wrote:

Beat me to it! Unless you have a Microsoft site licence (which is unlikely given the indicated size of your company) there is no way of buying W2000 for install on a new machine. I'd also add that there are likely to be driver issues on new hardware if you stay with W2000.
...
However - an idea. There are a few companies out there who sell older spec systems (new or refurb) that come with W2000. They may well be more powerful than the system you have at the moment.

Drats! I guess I'll have to check with MS to see if we can still get additional licences. Otherwise that is a problem.

Krishna

albertross_2

If something is hogging the processor, or you are running out of ram which causes pageing, then this may help identify the problem. (your ealier post suggested about 80Meg of ram free, that could be eaten up by dreamweaver etc, at which point the pc will crawl.).

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

If you really do have physical problems with the hard disk, then either a chkdsk or running a drive fitness test (from the hd manufacturers website), should identify it. There also may be stuff in the event log.

This utility will tell you exactly what is going on under the hood.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/processmonitor.mspx

Are these pc's attached to the internet via a router?

rmh_3

You can buy a basic PC, with XP Pro for under £300 (Excludes screen)
Without the OS it's under £200. (http://www.epcbuyer.com/products.asp?recid=1315)

You can install your copy of Windows 2000 on to it - provided you do not continue to use it on your existing PC (e.g. if you will be binning the current PC)

XP is much more stable than W2K and there's not really that much difference between it and W2K.